I find it interesting that in 2013 we still seem to struggle to define a basic set of emotions. I tend to understand this struggle as an indicator for a problem that needs to be solved. Further, i think that more accurate definitions would already help a lot.
Also, i believe that we should not mix emotion with cognition. According to my understanding theses are two separate things.
Let's see what others think.
Peter, you might want to dig a bit more into the idea of a dissociation of emotion and cognition. Behavioral regulating states, among which we'd place emotions, are all multifactorial, and they involve cognition and learning: for example, arousal/vigilance/fear modulated by locus ceoruleus generating norepinepherine expression, have multiple visceral effects that are registered by certain afferent nuclei -- thus the "feeling" of fear, awareness of heart pounding etc. -- but also influences attention, learning and memory. Anyway.
To your main question: My reading, though my primary area isn't emotion, is that the question of "what are basic emotions" won't soon be answered unless there's agreement about what's meant by "basic" or even how to define an emotional category. The typical definition suggests that any state mediated by higher order social inferences or self-evaluation is not primary. But that's not to say that happiness or fear or sadness are devoid of higher-order elements.
Jaan Panksepp would define basic emotions according to phylogenetic continuity -- that is, if some state has an analog across species, it's basic. There's no apparent analog to embarrassment in your cat, for example, so scratch that one. But fear certainly has a great deal of continuity, so keep it on the list. And so on. However, this can't be a complete answer (though it's appealing in many ways) because it begs the question of similarity (i.e., what counts as "analogous") and the fact that especially in humans there's a cognitive and learning aspect of the basic emotions as well as so-called "secondary" emotions. Moreover, you're still begging the question of how to classify emotions (how many, how finely differentiated, etc.).
In short, the lack of consensus might reflect the vagueness of the constructs and questions more than anything.
i found the dictionary set used in the LIWC software does a very good job of standardizing the emotional set. I think that more correlational analysis would be useful determine the strength of the relationship between the sub sets but the general categories are well constructed. We used this to analyze the 9/11 text messages in out forthcoming paper (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-012-9330-5).
Perhaps David, although the validation data for LIWC (against humans) is poor and very poor once you get down to the level of discrete emotions. To get back to the original questions, most researchers seem to accept that a definition of emotion may prove elusive for some time. Typically, "definitions" when they are offered are more a miniature theory than they are a definition insofar as they contain so many implicit assertions about the phenomenon in question. Personally (and I am in a minority here), I think we should be restricting our "definition" to affective phenomena that have a relatively universal experiential, cognitive, expressive, physiological and behavioral pattern. But that's just me . . .
Peter, you might want to dig a bit more into the idea of a dissociation of emotion and cognition. Behavioral regulating states, among which we'd place emotions, are all multifactorial, and they involve cognition and learning: for example, arousal/vigilance/fear modulated by locus ceoruleus generating norepinepherine expression, have multiple visceral effects that are registered by certain afferent nuclei -- thus the "feeling" of fear, awareness of heart pounding etc. -- but also influences attention, learning and memory. Anyway.
To your main question: My reading, though my primary area isn't emotion, is that the question of "what are basic emotions" won't soon be answered unless there's agreement about what's meant by "basic" or even how to define an emotional category. The typical definition suggests that any state mediated by higher order social inferences or self-evaluation is not primary. But that's not to say that happiness or fear or sadness are devoid of higher-order elements.
Jaan Panksepp would define basic emotions according to phylogenetic continuity -- that is, if some state has an analog across species, it's basic. There's no apparent analog to embarrassment in your cat, for example, so scratch that one. But fear certainly has a great deal of continuity, so keep it on the list. And so on. However, this can't be a complete answer (though it's appealing in many ways) because it begs the question of similarity (i.e., what counts as "analogous") and the fact that especially in humans there's a cognitive and learning aspect of the basic emotions as well as so-called "secondary" emotions. Moreover, you're still begging the question of how to classify emotions (how many, how finely differentiated, etc.).
In short, the lack of consensus might reflect the vagueness of the constructs and questions more than anything.
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